Episode #4: Discover the early-warning system every IT leader needs before go-live
How structured dialogue surfaces risks before they hit your rollout and ROI
The Early-Warning System Every IT Leader Needs Before Go-Live
Tech programs rarely fail because the system is wrong. They fail because the project team discovers misalignment when it’s already expensive, political, and visible. Dialogue—done early, consistently, and structurally—is the simplest way to avoid adoption failure and protect ROI.
This episode explores why dialogue is not a soft activity but a hard risk-mitigation protocol. We break down how misalignment forms, why resistance from line managers is often rational, and how structured qualitative and quantitative sensing gives IT leaders a real early-warning system. You’ll learn practical ways to detect behavioural risk months before go-live, when there is still time to act. For any CIO or program lead under ROI pressure, this is essential reading.
Most large technology programs underestimate one thing: how easy it is for misalignment to form between the project team and the organisation. The system may work. The project plan may be tight. But adoption hinges on the daily realities of people who must change their habits, tools, and performance routines. When you don’t catch misalignment early, it escalates into delays, rework, credibility loss, and in extreme cases, reputational damage on the outside. Nike’s 2001 supply chain disaster—caused not by bad tech but by missed insights from the field—is a memorable example of what happens when dialogue breaks down. This is not a communication failure. It’s a sensing failure. And sensing is what dialogue, done right, solves.
Large programs often rely on training to “manage” the human side. But these come too late. By the time you train end users, all critical design decisions are locked. You’re not sensing risk—you’re teaching people how to click. Behavioural science gives us a simple principle: people don’t resist the tool, they resist the consequences the tool creates in their day-to-day performance. If you don’t understand those consequences early, adoption becomes guesswork.
Dialogue, in this context, isn’t a townhall or a feature inbox. It’s a structured, systematic flow of insights from key parts of the organisation. You’re not asking, “What features do you want?” You’re asking, “Where will the new process break your real workflow? What critical integration point have we overlooked?” That’s how you identify landmines before stepping on them. And it changes everything about how you plan adoption.
Line managers are the most frequently misunderstood group in tech change. They’re often labelled as resistant, slow, or uncooperative. But they’re responding rationally to the “performance paradox”: while the project operates on a multi-quarter horizon, line managers are measured on this quarter. Pulling their people for testing, data migration, or super-user roles directly affects local KPIs and bonuses. When your project tells them to “get on board,” what they hear is “Please take a performance hit for us.” Understanding this behavioural dynamic is essential. It turns resistance from a moral judgment into a business reality you need to address. Dialogue—real, two-way dialogue—changes the dynamic. Asking questions like “What do you need from us to protect your team’s performance during implementation?” shifts you from adversary to ally.
But dialogue can’t be a one-time workshop. You need a dual-track, ongoing process: qualitative sensing and quantitative data.
Qualitative sensing means speaking to the right groups at the right moments in the program. Early on, this means your change agent network or local communicators. They give you the unfiltered “vibes on the ground”—what’s unclear, what’s worrying people, what’s not being said publicly. As you get closer to go-live, the qualitative sensing must shift to key users. These are the people who know exactly which parts of the new tool confuse users, where the workflow doesn’t match reality, and which processes will trigger frustration. These insights never show up in formal meetings—but they are exactly the insights that determine adoption.
Quantitative insights give you the complementary layer: a predictable cadence of short pulses that surface energy, confidence, and understanding across stakeholder groups. This is not a one-off survey. It’s a health check. Monthly pulses for your project team. Regular line-manager temperature checks to see how workload and sentiment are shifting. Senior-leader pulses to ensure alignment doesn’t drift. Training evaluations show whether the content is working or whether users are simply going through the motions. When you combine these data points into an adoption dashboard, patterns become visible long before they hurt your rollout.
The combination of qualitative and quantitative dialogue gives IT leaders something they almost never have: an early-warning system. Instead of discovering misalignment during UAT, or at go-live, or in Year 1 of your ROI evaluation, you catch the trend early—when it’s still fixable. This is where programs save money. This is how you avoid expensive rework. This is how you protect your credibility with the organisation and the board. And this is the logic behind the Change Playbook: codifying these sensing processes, automating the assessment, and feeding them into a real-time dashboard, so you’re not managing adoption by intuition.
Every IT leader knows the costs of flying blind. Decreased engagement in one country. A line manager network that quietly turns neutral. Key users who stop escalating issues. None of these risks show up in your Gantt chart. They show up in dialogue. When dialogue is absent, you lose visibility. And when visibility drops, adoption drops. That’s the behavioural reality of tech change.
Dialogue is work. It takes discipline.
It takes structure. But it is far cheaper than remediation, escalation, or reputational fallout. And it is entirely within the control of the IT organisation when supported by the right playbook. Tech change isn’t just about systems readiness. It’s about behavioural readiness. And behavioural readiness requires systematic sensing.
Key Takeaways (What IT Leaders Should Remember)
• Misalignment forms early and silently—dialogue is your detection mechanism.
• Line-manager “resistance” is rational, not emotional.
• Qualitative sensing finds the landmines; quantitative pulses show the pattern.
• Adoption dashboards outperform intuition every time.
• Dialogue is a risk protocol, not a comms activity.
About your host
Arne Kötting founded COSYN after years of seeing organisations struggle with the human side of tech change. He built the Change Playbook to codify what actually works based on 20 years of watching these patterns.
The Change Playbook is designed for IT program teams to confidently manage the human side of tech change in-house, without expensive consulting dependencies.
His conversational style cuts through complexity to reveal the fundamental principles that make tech change communication work - principles you can apply 1:1 to your own transformation challenges.
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